Probably within 1-2C of similar "extra wide" 120x37mm closed-loop coolers. Looks like Intel's solution is made by Asetek going by it's block and mounting design, so I'd compare it against the Antec 920 for starters.Reply

Still running i7-950 system (was an i7-920 back in 2008) and all I've upgraded since building it is a small bump in CPU speed, added water cooling, and installed two GTX660's in place of two GTX460's installed in 2010, which replaced the Radeon 4870x2 from the original 2008 assembly date. I've also replaced the original 500GB Seagate Boot Drive from 2008 with an Intel 160GB X25-M in 2010. Still use the same SSD to this day.

Same motherboard, same 6x2GB G.skill DDR3-1600 modules (that cost $600 back in 2008) and same PC Power & Cooling 750-QUAD.

I've added a USB 3.0 PCIe controller as well.

Overall, this is the longest (5 years) I've ever owned a system that retained the same motherboard. The irony is Intel discontinued Socket 1366 so fast it wasn't even funny. It was actively supported less than 2 years, and only 2 generations of chips (using the same architecture and process) were made within a year of each other, essentially giving this socket a 15-month lifetime.

But 5 years later, a system built on this socket is still faster than 90% of the production systems today.Reply

I'm a current 1156 socket owner running I7 875K @ 4.2. My rig is still running strong, but I'm ready for an upgrade. Just purchase a 4960x with 16 gig of Corsair Dominator Platinum at 2400 and the Asus Black Edition mobo. Hope the spending is worth it.Reply

What does this have to do with chizow's comment about the closed-loop cooler??

Absolutely nothing. I'm guessing it was just an easy way to get posted near the top.

Probably within 1-2C of similar "extra wide" 120x37mm closed-loop coolers. Looks like Intel's solution is made by Asetek going by it's block and mounting design, so I'd compare it against the Antec 920 for starters.

If I recall correctly, the 920 is 49mm thick. Also, I've found that fan selection can make more than a little difference. I would not expect the Intel cooler to match Antec's 920, given their history of racing to the bottom with cooler components. That said, it should beat the 620 and similar 120x120x25mm closed loop systems (assuming they didn't screw up the fan selection in epic manner).Reply

I run a i7950 at 4.07 ghz with a overclocking thermaltake cooler, 3x 580's and 12 gb ddr, am now upgrading to the i74960x, thermaltake water 3.0 and 2 x asus gtx 780ti sli, 32 gb ddr3. the old rig is still going strong and will use it for a simulator pc as i have a g27 sitting doing nothing. Great machine and has served me well!~Reply

just might add for the asus sabertooth x79, i74960x, 32gb 2400 ddr3, and 2 asus gtx 780ti oc cards is a $4000 upgrade, been doing a lot of overtime so i thought i would update while i got the extra cashReply

Corsairs closed loop and Intel's appear to be built by the same company.. Some of Corsair's earlier attempts were noisy whereas you didn't really have that problem with Intel's. Overall I think it's a pretty solid contender with very few faults. There is better on the market obviously... but it's decent for it's price.Reply

Excellent review. I must say the reviews Anand himself writes always seem to be spot on. One question, where does the 22 months number come from? Is that the scheduled/rumored/leaked release date of Haswell-E? If so, isn't that going to be even more behind than Ivy-E? I'm assuming Skylake will have been out for longer than Haswell has been out now, no? Also, do we know that Skylake will support DDR4? I've heard Haswell-E will.

Anywho, thanks for the excellent review, I thoroughly enjoyed it.Reply

It's not often that I think that a review really nails it all (at least for what I need), but this one did it. Very balanced, taking shots at the weak points, while also thoroughly explaining what is good about it, and who it might benefit.

X79 is adequate only if you are willing to load your machine up with lots of add-in controller cards.

Intel will really need to up their game on the chipset when Haswell-E gets here. Reply

With so few new things coming out in the desktop division these days Im sure Anand is quite fine to getting back into the trenches to do the odd review. Used to be (or so it seemed) every other day we were getting glimpses at exciting new things but these days that appears in the form of tablets and smartphones /w the desktop industry being somewhat stagnant in my opinion. Reply

At this rate, as Anand suggests, Haswell-E will come out around/after Skylake based Desktop parts(assuming that is still on track for 2015 release). I am convinced that it would have been a better approach to skip Haswell-E altogether and jump straight to Skylake-E in 2015. This logic is further supported by the fact that next gen will require a new socket design (since Haswell comes with FIVR).Reply

Since there is going to be a Haswell refresh in 2014, I'd expect Haswell-E to be introduced around the same time: roughly a year from now. The delay of Broadwell on the desktop will allow Haswell-E to catch up in cadence a bit.

The new question is when Broadwell-E will arrive: with Skylake or vanilla Broadwell on the desktop?Reply

nice cpu for those that have an older platform (like 1156 or 1366 maybe) but as someone that already owns a 2011 socket cpu im still hoping they will eventually release 8 or even 10/12 core cpu's so i can encode vids fastercmon intel release those 8/10/12 core cpu's for the enthusiast platform.!Reply

Whats the point? A 10-core only runs at 2GHz, and a 8-core only runs at 3 GHz, so both have less overall performance than a 6-core overclocked to more than 4GHz. You simply cannot put more computing power into a reasonable power envelope for a single socket. If a water-cooled Enthusiast 6-core is not enough for your needs, you automatically need a 2-socket system.

And its not like that is not feasible for enthusiasts. The ASUS Z9PE-D8 WS, the EVGA Classified SR-X and the Supermicro X9DAE are mainboard aiming at the enthusiast / workstation market, combining two sockets for XEON-26xx with the capability to run GPUs in SLI/CrossFire. And if you are looking to spend significantly more than 1k$ for a CPU, the 400$ on those boards and the extra cost for ECC Memory should not scare you either.

who cares if the power envelope is "reasonable"?i already have my SBE overclocked to 5.125Ghz and if they release a 10core i would oc that thing like a mutha******

that link you posted is EXACTLY why i want a 10/12 core instead of dual socket (which i could afford if it made sense performance wise) - its obvious that video encoding doesnt work well with NUMA and dual sockets but it does work well with multi cored single cpu's

so i say give me a 10 core and let me OC it like crazy - i dont care if it ends up using 350W+ i have some pretty insane watercooling to suck it up (3k ultra kaze's in push/pull on a rx480rad 24v laingd5s raystorm wb - a little over the top but isnt that what these extreme cpu's are for?)Reply

I have to agree with you in the extreme market who gives a damn about being green, most will run 1200watt Plat mod PSUs with an added extra 450 watt in the background, and 4GPUs as this is pretty much the only reason to buy into 2011 socket in the first place 2 extra cors and 40x PCIe lanes.Reply

I could not agree with you more! I have a OC'd i920 that just keeps chugging along and if I'm going to drop some coin on an upgrade, I want it to be an UPGRADE. Let ME decide what's reasonable for power consumption. If I burn up a 8/10 core CPU with some crazy cooling solution then it's MY fault. I accept this. This is the hobby that I've chosen and it comes with risks. This is not some elementary school "color by numbers" hobby where you can follow a simple set of instructions to get the desired result in 10 minutes. This is for the big boys. It takes weeks or more to get it right and even then, we know we can do better. Not interested in XEON either.Reply

Assuming a 6 Core OC'd to 5Ghz Stable, 6c @ 5.0 and 150W? (More Power due to OC)effectively 30Ghz.

So tell me again how a highly OC'd and large unavailable to the masses 6c is better than a 10/12c when you need Multiple Threads?Keep in mind those 10 and 12 core Server CPUs are almost entirely AIR cooled and not overclocked.

I think they should have released an 8 and 10 core Enthusiast CPU. Hike up the price and let the market decide which one they want.Reply

Fair enough, for Ivy Bridge Xeons, the 10core at 3 GHz has been announced. I'll believe that claim when I see some actual benchmarks on it. I have some serious doubts that a 10core at 3 GHz can actually use less power than an 8 core at 3.4 GHz. So lets see on what frequency those parts will actually run, under load.

Furthermore, the effective GHz are not the whole truth, even on highly parallel tasks. While cache seems to scale with the number of cores for most Xeons, memory bandwidth does not, and there are always overheads due to the common use of the L3 cache and the memory.

Finally, not directly towards you but to several people talking about "green": Entirely not the point. No matter how much power your cooling system can remove, you are always creating thermal gradients when generating too much heat on a very small space. Why do you guys think there was no 3.5GHz 8 core for Sandy Bridge-EP? The silicon is the same for 6-core and 8-core, the core itself could run the speed. But INTEL is not going to verify the continued operation of a chip with a TDP >150W.

They give a little leeway when it comes to the K-class, because there the risk is with customer to a certain point. But they just won't go and sell a CPU which reliably destroys itself or the MB the very moment somebody tries to overclock it.Reply

All I really learn from these high end CPU results is that if you actually invested in high end 1366 in the form of 980x all that time ago, you've got probably the longest lasting system in terms of good performance that I can even think of.Reply

I had a launch model Core 2 Duo (the E6300) that with overclocking (1.86Ghz => 2.77Ghz) was a pretty decent CPU until last year (when I replaced it with an Ivy Bridge Core i5). That's what? Six years out of the CPU and it's still going strong for my buddy (to whom it now belongs).Reply

"My biggest complaint about IVB-E isn't that it's bad, it's just that it could be so much more. With a modern chipset, an affordable 6-core variant (and/or a high-end 8-core option) and at least using a current gen architecture, this ultra high-end enthusiast platform could be very compelling."

I think that you answered why Intel isn't going this route earlier in the article. Consumers are getting the smaller 6 core Ivy Bridge-E chip. There is also a massive 12 core chip due soon for socket 2011 based servers. Harvesting an 8 core versions from the 12 core die is an expensive proposition and something Intel may not have the volumes for (they're not going to hinder 10 and 12 core capable dies to supply 8 core volumes to consumers). Still, if Intel wanted to, they could release an 8 core Sandy bridge-E chip and use that for their flag ship processor since the architectural differences between Sandy and Ivy Bridge are minor.

The chipset situation just sucks. Intel didn't even have to release a new chipset, they could have released an updated X79 (Z79 perhaps?) that fixed the initial bugs. For example, ship with SAS ports enabled and running at 6 Gbit speeds.Reply

"The big advantages that IVB-E brings to the table are a ridiculous number of PCIe lanes , a quad-channel memory interface and 2 more cores in its highest end configuration."

I'm going to pick on you a little bit here Anand, because I think it is important that we convey an accurate image to Intel about what we as end-users want from the hardware they design. 40 PCIe 3.0 lanes is NOT "ridiculous". In fact, for my purposes I would call it "inadequate". Sure, "my purposes" are running 3 2560x1440 screens @ 120Hz and that isn't the average rig today, but I want to suggest it isn't far off what people are now asking for. We should be encouraging Intel to give us more PCIe connectivity, not implying we have too much already. :)Reply

I for one would like to be able to run 2x PCIe x16 GPU's and at least 1 each of LSI SAS 2008, dual port DDR or QDR Infiniband, dual port 10GBe and perhaps an actual RAID card.

Sure that is a somewhat extreme example. But you can only run one of the expansion cards plus 2 GPU before you run out of lanes. This is an enthusiast platform after all. Many of us are going to want to do Extreme things with it.Reply

On the one hand, good review. On the other hand, my dream of a new build in the "performance" line is snuffed out. It just seems so lame making all these compromises vs Haswell, and basically things will never get better because the platform target is shifting to mobile and so battery life is key and performance parts will just never be a focus again.Reply

If you really want that number of cores, Ivy Bridge E5/E7 Xeons are going to deliver that, in the 150W power envelope. This is useful in the server market, but will only sell in homeopathic quantities in the desktop market. Still, you should be able to find them in retail around Christmas. Knock yourself out!

Really IB-E is a free product for Intel, which is the only reason it made it to market at all. They need the 6-core dies for the medium density servers anyway, which is where they actually make sense over SB-Xeons, due to the smaller power envelope/higher efficiency. The investment to turn that core into a consumer product on an existing platform is almost zero, short of a small marketing budget, and possibly a tiny bit of (re-)validation.

This was never a product designed for the enthusiast market, and is being shoe-horned into that position. Due to the smaller die Intel can probably make better margin over SB-E, which is the only reason to introduce this product in the sector anyway, and possibly to get some brand awareness going with the launch of a new flagship.

From an economical point of view it makes no sense for Intel to have an actual enthusiast platform. Haswell refresh will be unlikely to bring more cores either (and without the extra I/O they would be a bit hobbled, I imagine), so possibly with Skylake there will be a 6-core upper mainstream solution. Still unlikely from an economical point of view, as Intel would probably prefer sticking to two dies, and going 6/4 may not be economical, whereas selling 6-core CPUs as quads (as they do with 48xx) doesn't work that well in the part of the market that generates reasonable volume.Reply

the problem with xeon is that you cant overclock them so my 5ghz SBE would be close to as good as a 8/10 core xeon

i dont really care about why intel are not releasing high core count cpu's i just know i want them at a decent price ($1k and under) and overclockable - these 6 core ones just dont make the cut anymore

i just hate the direction cpu's are going with low power low core count highly integrated everythiing, 5 years ago i was dreaming of 8 core cpu's being standard about now but we still have 4 (6 with sbe) core cpu's as standard which blows and per core performance hasnt really changed much going from sandy bridge to haswell

i dont care about power and heat just give me the performance i want to encode highest quality handbrake movies in less than 24 hours.!!Reply

"All" you want is Intel to invest a massive development effort in order to produce for the first time an overclocking CPU with a TDP of around 200W, with silicone for which their business customers would pay 2k$ to 3k$, and sell it to you and the other 500 people in your niche for less than 1k$?

2 socket is inefficient for my workloadsthey could just release a xeon that is unlocked and let me do what i want with it - its not like the workstation/server guys would overclock so its not like intel would be losing any moneyno development needed2-3k? i can already buy 8 core SBE for 1k - why not let me oc that?Reply

Many would overclock when Intel is charging hundreds of dollars for just small GHz bumps. You won't seem the academic or large corporation clusters doing it, but the small businesses with just a handful of workstations? They might.

Look at the 2660 v2 2.2GHz at $1590 and the 2680 v2 2.8GHz at $1943. That's $353 for 600MHz. On a dual processor system its $700, then you have to pay the markups from those actually selling the computers (ie Dell/HP), which takes $700 to $1000 or more. One small little tweak and you're saving yourself $1000, while not stressing the system all that much (assuming you don't go crazy and try to get 3.5GHz from that 2.2GHz base chip).Reply

The catch though is that the mbds used for these systems don't haveBIOS setups which support oc'ing, and the people who use them aren'tgenerally experienced in such things. I know someone at a larger moviecompany who said it'd be neat to be able to experiment with this,especially an unlocked XEON, but in reality the pressures of time, thescale of the budgets involved, the large number of systems used forrenderfarms, the OS management required, etc., all these issues meanit's easier to just buy off the shelf units and scale as required (therenderfarm at the company I'm thinking of has more than 7000 corestotal, mostly based on Dell blade servers) and management isn't thatinterested in doing anything different or innovative/risky. It's easyto think a smaller company might be more likely to try such a thing,but in reality for a smaller company it would be a much largerfinancial risk to do so. Bigger companies could afford to try it, butaren't geared up for such ideas.

Btw, oc'ing a XEON is viable with single-socket mbds that happen tosupport them and have chipsets which don't rely on the CPU multiplierfor oc'ing, eg. an X5570 on an Asrock X58 Extreme6 works ok (I haveone); the chip advantage is a higher TDP and 50% faster QPI compared toa clock-comparable i7 950.

Sadly, other companies often don't bother supporting XEONs anyway;Gigabyte does on some of its boards (X58A-UD3R is a good example) butASUS tends not to.

Some have posted about core efficiency and they're correct; I have aDell T7500 with two X5570s, but my oc'd 3930K beats it for highlythreaded tasks such as CB 11.5, and it's about 2X faster for single-threaded ops. The 3930K's faster RAM probably helps aswell (64GBDDR3/2400, vs. only DDR3/1333 in the Dell which one can't change).

Someone commented about Intel releasing an unlocked XEON. Of coursethey could, but they won't because they don't need to, and biz userswouldn't really care, it's not what they want, and note that powerefficiency is very important for big server setups, something of whichoc'ing can of course make utterly ruin. :D Someone said who cares aboutpower guzzling when it comes to enthusiast builds, and that's true, butwhen it comes to XEONs the main target market does care, so again Intelhas no incentive to bother releasing an unlocked XEON.

I agree with the poster who said 40 PCIe lanes isn't ridiculous. We hadsuch provision with X58, so if anything for a top-end platform only 40lanes isn't that impressive IMO. Far worse is the continued limit ofjust 2 SATA3 ports; that really is a pain, because the 3rd partycontrollers are generally awful. The Asrock X79 Extreme11 solved thisto some extent by offering onboard SAS, but they kinda crippled it bynot having any cache RAM as part of the built-in SAS chip.

"It's easy to think a smaller company might be more likely to try such a thing, but in reality for a smaller company it would be a much larger financial risk to do so. Bigger companies could afford to try it, but aren't geared up for such ideas.

Btw, oc'ing a XEON is viable with single-socket mbds that happen to support them and have chipsets which don't rely on the CPU multiplier for oc'ing, eg. an X5570 on an Asrock X58 xtreme6 works ok (I have one); the chip advantage is a higher TDP and 50% faster QPI compared to a clock-comparable i7 950."

These two statements work against eachother. If OC a SP xeon is relatively easy, only if supported, there isn't much reason a DP xeon set up couldn't be OCed within reason without much effort.

I'm not going to say this would be a common thing, but the small shops run by someone with a "tinkerer" mind set towards computing would certainly be interested in attempting to get that extra 10-20% performance, which Intel would change another $1000 or more for, but get it for free.Reply

Z9PE-D8 WS has decent overclocking options (not like their consumer X79 boards, but not bad either).

However, apart from a small BCLK bump, this is useless as SNB-EP and IVB-EP Xeons are locked.

The best I can do with dual Xeon 2697 v2 is ~3150 MHz (I might be able to go a bit further but I did not bother) for all-core turbo.

Even if Intel ignores the business reasons NOT to allow Xeon overclocking (to force high-performance-trading people to buy more expensive Xeons as they showed willingness to overclock and, so, potentially cannibalize market for more expensive EX parts) technically this would be a huge challenge.

Why? Well, 12-core Xeon 2697 power-usage would literally explode if you allow running this on 4+ GHz and with voltages normally seen in overclocking world. I am sure the power draw of the single part would be more than 300W, so 600W for a dual-socket board.

This is not unheard of (after all, high-end GPUs can draw comparable power) - however, this would mandate significantly higher specs for the motherboard components and put people in actual danger of fires by using inadequate components.

Maybe when Intel moves to Haswell E/EP - when the voltage regulation becomes CPUs's business, maybe they can find a way to allow overclocking of such huge CPUs after passing lots of checks. Otherwise, Intel runs huge risk of being sued for causing fires.Reply

as someone who regularly does encoding, 4k gaming, and (when not in use otherwise) folding@home - all things which can fully leverage mult-core processors and powerfull GPUs - i look forward to these reviews of new enthusiast class processors. and, it saddens me that since SB-E there have been only marginal improvements in this sector. i never thought we (as a technology power-house, and as a society) would settle for this. for me, it all began when they started putting GPUs on-die with CPUs for desktop PCs (sure, for laptops i can certainly understand) - i mean who DOESN'T use a discreet GPU in a desktop system???? and for those who do, why don't you just get a laptop???

GPUs on-die took the focus away from the CPU. and, while there are minimal gains to be had, the showing here today is abysmal. 2 yrs of waiting and we get a 5% increase (for what i do, i want power and could really care less about power draw - as i would say most enthusiasts do). i get it - to build more powerful hardware, it HAS to become more efficient, but it's an evolutionary development process. haswell could very easily be an enthusiast class product: get rid of the rediculous GPU (for the desktop), double the core count, and raise the TDP to 125/130 (haswell-E?) - and they could do it a LOT earlier than 1-2 years from now. come on Intel - stop screwing the guys who you built your reputation on (after all, it's always the fastest/most powerfull hardware that's shown in reviews to boost the reputation of any company).

i agree very disappointingtoo much integration and not enough performance is the problem with modern intel cpusi dont want integrated graphics and vrm's and whatever else they plan on integrating - i want huge core counts in a single die for the enthusiast platform.!Reply

I bet it's tiny. I bet the i3/i5 chips outsell them 50 to 1. Thats why stuff isn't happening at the top so much. The demand has dwindled. Ten years ago a lot of people could eat all the cpu power they could get their hands on. Now? Not so much. Plenty people now still happy with their 2008/9 spec quads. Basically these top end Intel i7 chips are the Mercedes S class. A way for Intel to put new stuff and techniques in, that may or may not filter down in the future generations.

Intel knows the figures and it knows that the action is at the other end of the spectrum. Not for folks that largely want to rip video and run benchmarks all day.Reply

i agree they dont sell as many as the lower end cpu's but why not just sell us an unlocked xeon than can also OC?

its not like they would lose money from letting us OC the xeon because the people that would normally buy a xeon for servers etc would never think about overclocking them

then its a win/win situation for intel as they are still getting their xeon money and they will have a decent enthusiast cpu alsoand yes i would happily pay 1k (the price i can find current SBE 8 core cpu's) for an OCable 8 core Reply

I believe the only way to get a specially binned or configured chip from Intel is to be an OEM and order a large volume. For an unlocked Xeon, the only chance Intel would release such a system would be under contract for a super computer contract that also used liquid cooling.

OEM's like HP, Dell and Apple can also acquire specifically binned chips for a premium if the OEM wants something better or for a discount if Intel has excess inventories of low grade chips they need to sell. Reply

In conclusion, if you're an enthusiast who wants a high core count, Xeon is your only choice. For the price of the top-end Xeon you can buy a pretty decent second-hand car!We really need AMD to get back into the high-end game.Reply

When are these E5 V2 Xeons gonna be out ? Why release this first instead of the new Xeons ?

Hardly any performance increase after 22 months. I get that they want to be able to sell the 12-cores Xeon for three grands instead of one, but why can't they just add two extra cores to 4960X instead of just adding 200MHz ?Reply

Intel is so greedy. They could have made this chip 10 core / 20 thread and the die size still would have been less than SNB-E. For a high end part, a chip this small is just a slap in the face. I hope their greed costs them lots of $$.Reply

Sure. Also, the TDP at close to 4 GHz would have been 220W. And the majority of customers would have tried to overclock them and drive 300W through them. And either complained because they damage too easily, or because of the lousy overclocking potential. Reply

IB-E is a massive failure just like SB-E. Thanks Intel for killing the highend for me. Actually, I think this is their plan, to kill the highend. Its ridiculous that this platform is so far behind the mainstream platform. 2x sata 6GB/s ports? No Intel USB 3.0? Worse Single threaded performance than mainstream? Sandy Bridge-e seemed like an unfinished project where many compromises were made and ivy-e looks the same. Reply

Anand, you write that Corsair supplied 4x 8GB DDR3-1866 Vengeance Pro memory for the testbed. However, you also remark "infrequent instability at stock voltages" with 32 GB. Then, in the legend of memory latency chart, you write "Core i7-4960X (DDR3-1600)" .

So I wonder which memory configuration was actually used during the benchmarks? Less than 32 GB with DDR3-1866, non-stock voltages, or 32GB DDR3-1600? Wouldn't anything but 4x DDR3-1866 be a little bit unfair because you otherwise don't utilise the full potential of the CPU?Reply

Nice job Anand, your conclusion pretty much nailed it as to why LGA2011 doesn't cut it today and why this release is pretty ho-hum in general. I would've liked to have seen some 4820K results in there to better illustrate the difference between 4770K Haswell and SB-E, but I suppose that is limited by what review samples you received.

But yeah, unless you need the 2 extra cores or need double DIMM capacity, there's not much reason to go LGA2011/IVB-E over Haswell at this point. Even the PCIe lane benefit is hit or miss for Nvidia users, as PCIe 3.0 is not officially supported for Nvidia cards and their reg hack is hit or miss on some boards still.

The downsides of LGA2011 vs LGA1150 are much greater, imo, as you lose 4 extra SATA3(6G) ports and native USB 3.0 as you covered, along with much lower overall platform power consumption. The SATA3 situation is probably the worst though, as 2 isn't really enough to do much, but 6 opens up the possibility of an SSD boot drive along with a few really fast SATA3 RAID0 arrays.Reply

I'm really disappointed by these numbers. As a software developer, the FireFox compile benchmark best indicates the benefit I would get from upgrading to this CPU. And, it looks like the 4770K would be about the same difference - except far less expensive. I really don't think I need anything more than 16GB for RAM, and one high-end graphics card is enough to drive my single WQHD (2560x1440) display. Do bragging rights count? No...I mean really?Reply

What's a Xeon going to do? Be slower than the 4960X? You lose clock speed by going with huge core counts and that translates to even more losses in single threaded performance. There comes a point where there are diminishing returns on adding more cores... (see AMD)Reply

Your best bet would be to hope for desktop CrystalWell part. That extra cache should do wonders for compile times even if you'd lose a bit of clock speed. However, Intel is intentionally holding back the best socket 1150 parts they could offer as the benefits of Crystalwell + TSX optimized software would put performance into large core count Xeon territory in some cases.Reply

Can you have a comparison chart please for the 4770k, E5-8core Xenon, 4960X, with benchmarks included. This kind of makes little sense to me X-79 was behind on feature sets like full SATA3 when in reality a lot of these boards will be used as workstation/normal/gaming computers, performance on those boards tends to suffer because lack there of native support. Instead 3rd party chips are used to add extra features which have significant drawbacks. I understand using the socket for 2 gen in order to extend life of boards however 1336 and the next leap to haswell should have been taken, making a board last 2 years with the prime features that defined that generation. This just seams like intel is ignoring its higher end market due to lack of competition out there.Reply

So where's the 4820k review? I don't care much about more than 4 cores, but I need more I/O than Haswell offers. (crappy motherboards that offer either 8/4/4 or 8/8/2 are just unacceptable.) I'd like to know how the 4820k overclocks and handles I/O from dual and triple SLi/Crossfire. Reply

Visual Studio unfortunately does not compile in parallel the way you might think. In a solution you may have multiple projects. If one project depends on four other projects, those four will be compiled in parallel; one project per thread. Once the four dependencies are built, it can build the fifth; however, that last project will be built single-threaded.

Xcode and native Android projects (with gcc) can actually build multiple files from one project in parallel. On an i7 with hyperthreading, all eight logical processors can build up to eight files simultaneously. This scales with more cores very nicely.

In summary, VS builds multiple projects from one solution in parallel, while gcc builds multiple files from one project in parallel; the latter of which is much faster.

I'm curious now to see the build times of Firefox for Mac on a rMBP with an i7. Eagerly waiting for a 12 core Mac Pro with 24 logical processors.Reply

Visual Studio is a very poor parallel compilation test. GCC with make -p can really utilise a lot more cores but its not very Windows like to use GCC (although I suspect many developers do that).

I haven't found many Java builds doing well on multiple cores, and neither Scala. Its the unit tests where I get the cores going, I can saturate hundreds of cores with unit tests if I had them, and since I run them in the background on every change I certainly do get a lot of usage out of the extra cores. But a clean compile is not one of those cases where I see any benefit from the 6 cores. Of course I would hope these days we don't do that very often.Reply

Most Intel chips use a Tick Tock release cycle. Tick Tock Tick Tock Tick Tock etcTick is an Incremental upgrade. Same socket and largely same design, but reduced lithography (32nm down to 22nm for example). Sometimes new Instructions but often not.Tock is an Overhaul upgrade. Uses same Lithography as the previous gen, but is a new internal architecture, often a new Socket, and where most new Instruction sets show up.Then you get another Tick.

Core 2/Conroe was a Tock and was 65nmCore 2/Penryn was a Tick and was 45nmCore iX/Nehalem was a Tock and was 45nmCore iX/Westmere was a Tick and was 32nmCore iX/Sandy Br was a Tock and was 32nmCore iX/Ivy Bridge is a Tick and is 22nmCore iX/Haswell is a Tock and is 22nm

So to say that X79 is a dead platform should not really be a shock to anyone. They got Sandy and Ivy out of it. Thats 1 Tock and 1 Tick and now its time to move on. They do this exact same thing in the 2P Server market where people spend $10K or more per server. The fact of the matter is the server market has already pretty much learned. Don't bother upgrading that server/machine, just ride it for 3-4 years and then replace it completely. SATA, Memory and CPUs have all changed enough by then you want to reset everything anyway.Reply

Is the IHS soldered or using the cheap termal material? The issue with desktop IB & Haswell overclockability has been proven to be the cheap thermal material between the chip and IHS. If they have a soldered chip to IHS then this will be a decent upgrade over straight IB.Reply

Considering the power consumption, clock speed, overclock and temperature obtained its looking most like this is the same interface as SB-E - ie its soldered. Not that it makes much difference as just like SB-E it doesn't actually overclock all that well compared to its 4 core sibling.Reply

Look at the results: temperature is not the main problem any more due to the bigger die, but OC is still not good at 4.3 GHz / 1.4 V. Actually I'd say this is ridiculously bad compared to earlier 22 nm chips (my Ivy can do this at ~1.1 V).

And I recently got a 3770K which requires 1.11 V to even hit 4.0 GHz! Seems to me Intels current process is to blame for Haswell OC rather than the thermal paste. Sure, temps drop when replacing the paste.. but OC doesn't improve all that much, does it? And if Ivy and Ivy-E don't clock all that well either...Reply

If SNB-E @ 435 mm^2 fit into 130W then they could have made IVB-E @ 435 mm^2 fit into about the same power envelope. If they had to drop the clocks a couple hundred MHz then that's a small price to pay for 10 cores.Reply

Oh I've waiting for this! Now the most important question to me...which motherboard is everyone getting an Ivy Bridge-E going to use? I'm doing a custom water cooled loop if that makes any difference.Reply

Wow! 40 PCIe lanes sounds great until you remember skt. 2011 still only supports two 'true' sata3 ports and no native usb3. PCIe storage is never a smooth experience. It's a shame Intel seems unconcerned with power users that are not enterprised based.Reply

What a shame these don't support ECC memory! I want it back for the enthusiast!

I'm a scientist, what am I supposed to purchase (privately)? I want a beefy machine for physics simulations at home that run for days/weeks i.e. What if a privat person wants to run several VMs?The E-series would provide nice performance, but no ECC, what a shame!

Right now one has to pick between speed without ECC (chances are the crashes on you) or a chip with relatively slow performance (clock wise) to get ECC, at the same price point. The highend XEON CPUs are out of the question.

@ Anand, please point out to the Intel representatives you meet that there's a market for this! One has to consider AMD at this point, they offer many threads + ECC for a consumer price point. Granted, they're slower, but the premium for the Intel chips with ECC is just out of proportion for private use.Reply

The E5-1660 will be the same as the 4960X, just not unlocked and with ECC. Same 6 cores, same 3.6-4.0 GHz range. Is the overclocking really worth all the hassle for maybe 20% speed increase, even if you had ECC?

But I generally agree, it looks like Ivy Bridge 49xx/E5-16xx v2 is probably worth skipping. The upgrade over Sandy is not that much, and Haswell will likely bring 8-cores to the 59xx/16xx v3 space. Ivy Bridge for the top end only really made big gains in the 26xx space thanks to adding 10 and 12 core options, but man do you pay for them....Reply

Would be fascinated to see some statistics re tri and quad sli usage as I'm already using 3 titans. There seems to be almost no coverage at that end of the scale despite being one of the target markets for this chip.Reply

This reminds me, of years ago when I had access to the first DEC Alpha with its super fast clock speed and fast IPC, a IBM AIX RS6000, a HP9000 PA-RISC and a multi-socket Sparc. The alpha was the fastest by a long way versus multi core even on our SAP systems. I still use this as a rule of thumb that for most tasks a faster clocked processor is better most of the time, except for very specific situations - and in general you will know what they are. I'm battling with what to do with my next upgrade, I really wanted a top end ivy-e but it really doesn't seem worth it compared to a 4770, even with my need to run big VM's. he'll its not enough faster than my i2500s ivy imac to be worth it.Reply

Should nVidia's shadowplay turn out to be rubbish then I could use that CPU for encoding recorded gameplay, otherwise there's no benefit in having a 4960X over a 4770K. It won't improve my gaming experience any. Two GTX 780s will do that.Reply

This is a great article for informing us about the latest and greatest architecture and chips, anyway I too have stuck with my powerhouse system since 2006, mine is the Q9550 and P35 mobo, DDR2 second generation SSD and so forth!It has been rock solid and frankly I don't think I remember the last time it crashed, come to think of it it has never crashed! (...and I am able to have all my progs running plus 30 plus instances of chrome, yeah I should do something about that!)So there you have it, now i m looking at the LGA 2011 with X79 and maybe (If i can convince myself of the benefits of having a six core system) an i7 4920 or40, ...but will probably go with their 4 core 10 or 12 meg cache cpus...the difference in having 2 more cores is 200 bux! I don't have any problem spending 3 bills on a nice CPU, but when it comes to 2 more bills just to get 2 more cores, I really cant convince myself of that, since i can think of so many other ways to spend those two bills with more return so to speak!So yeah building a powerhouse of a system that costs a little more but is rock solid and still faster than 90 percent of what is out there is worth it for me, and I am sure others will say the same!Or maybe I can just get the better P45 chipset, and stick with this system for another two to three years!Reply

I edit video from time to time and am currently using an i7-2600k system built in May of 2011. I've been looking at the 6 core i7-3930k, but not sure if it provides enough of an increase to build a new system. Are we closer to an 8 core solution coming out under $1000 in 2014? What's on the way?Reply

You guys should really, really include ArmA as a benchmark for CPU gaming performance, as it sees pretty much constant improvements as the CPU gets more potent. I do not understand why more sites don't use A3 for CPU benchmarking when they touch on gaming performance.Reply